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$35 sculpture found at an Austin Goodwill was looted from a museum during WWII

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Re: $35 sculpture found at an Austin Goodwill was looted from a museum during WWII

#181

Post by DocTomoe »

slim wrote: post #152
LanceH wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not Italian either.

it could be. the article says it comes from a museum dedicated to pompei

Let's just assume that the way 19th century, Ludwig-II-style museums worked was not exactly historically accurate. This is the king who built Neuschwanstein Castle. He essentially cosplayed as a Roman sometimes, and he built a "Roman villa", more as a holiday home than a museum, and a roman villa needs roman stuff in it. It only became a museum later, half dedicated to the Romans, half to the old king.

https://www.schloesser.bayern.de/englisch/palace/objects/as_...

Re: $35 sculpture found at an Austin Goodwill was looted from a museum during WWII

#182

Post by __turbobrew__ »

stormbrew wrote: post #98
Ansil849 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it a moral crime to simply appreciate a painting, even though it was stolen hundreds of years ago? Yes. Because your enjoyment deprives the ancestors of the people who actually created it. Try personalizing this to see if it resonates. There's a quilt that has been in your family for centuries, with each family member adding a patch. At some point, your house is burglarized and the quilt is taken. Hundreds of ye…

And for that matter, if the people it was stolen from decided it wasn't worth preserving who are you to decide they're wrong? It's the height of colonial arrogance to assume we know better, that we can value the works of other cultures better than they can. That our enjoyment is more important than their history and self-determination .

I have a hard time categorizing ISIS destroying thousands of years old ruins and artefacts as “self-determination”. If I had the choice between stealing these artefacts and putting them in a museum versus letting a radical group of religious fundamentalists destroy a valuable part of ancient history I would chose the former.

Re: $35 sculpture found at an Austin Goodwill was looted from a museum during WWII

#183

Post by theshrike79 »

golergka wrote: post #172
ryan_j_naughton wrote: post #170

The Germans don't really have any more right to it than she does. The most likely story of this bust is from the 5th century until the 18th or 19th centuries, it was buried in the ground somewhere in Italy or former Roman empire. The person who dug it up and sold it didn't really have an inherent right to it. They just found it. I say all this not from a legal perspective but from an inheritors of history and culture…

> The person who dug it up and sold it didn't really have an inherent right to it. They just found it. I don't get it. Why wouldn't a person who found it have a right to it?

If I go and dig up a fresh grave right now and steal all the valuables, do I have a "right" to those?

How old does the grave, in your opinion, have to be for me to get that right?

Re: $35 sculpture found at an Austin Goodwill was looted from a museum during WWII

#184

Post by DaedPsyker »

asdff wrote: post #165
robonerd wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't know that. The German museum it was in was built in the 1840s, a hundred years before this sculpture was looted from it. It may well have been legally purchased a century or more before nazis existed.

I could not imagine that whatever this process must have looked like in the 1840s was completely bilateral for all parties. This was the era where you just sent an archaeologist and got some local day laborers to dig where you heard there might be good stuff, and took whatever you wanted back no questions asked.

Roman artefacts are dug up all over western Europe and even further. Is your premise that only one country is the allowed descendants of the Empire and that other constituted parts of the Empire aren't allowed their shared legacy?

Re: $35 sculpture found at an Austin Goodwill was looted from a museum during WWII

#185

Post by hef19898 »

golergka wrote: post #172
ryan_j_naughton wrote: post #170

The Germans don't really have any more right to it than she does. The most likely story of this bust is from the 5th century until the 18th or 19th centuries, it was buried in the ground somewhere in Italy or former Roman empire. The person who dug it up and sold it didn't really have an inherent right to it. They just found it. I say all this not from a legal perspective but from an inheritors of history and culture…

> The person who dug it up and sold it didn't really have an inherent right to it. They just found it. I don't get it. Why wouldn't a person who found it have a right to it?

In most places, you don't. Even if the land is yours, the state has the ownership rights. You can get a decompensation so. Which sucks in cases were they find some roman ruins when digging the basement of your house... But then you can also find WW2 bombs were I live, luckily, they didn't find neither under our house.

Re: $35 sculpture found at an Austin Goodwill was looted from a museum during WWII

#186

Post by [deleted] »

paulmd wrote: post #166
asdff wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But in this case the museum doesn't have a better claim than you do either that they aren't the thief, just an older one. In fact theirs seems worse, just a record that they possessed it at one point in the 1920s. Could be that the curators who first logged it into inventory were the original thieves in the line plundering it from someone else vs paying fairly.

In the legal perspective, none of that matters. If the artifact can be definitively proven to have belonged to X, and they were robbed, then it belongs to X regardless of who's done anything in the meantime. That's the legal answer here. The same is true of real property, or a stereo. It belongs to the person it originally belonged to, before it was stolen. Morally, it's debatable. Legally, it's straightforward, a st…

[deleted]

Re: $35 sculpture found at an Austin Goodwill was looted from a museum during WWII

#187

Post by fouronnes3 »

DocTomoe wrote: post #173
ryan_j_naughton wrote: post #170

The Germans don't really have any more right to it than she does. The most likely story of this bust is from the 5th century until the 18th or 19th centuries, it was buried in the ground somewhere in Italy or former Roman empire. The person who dug it up and sold it didn't really have an inherent right to it. They just found it. I say all this not from a legal perspective but from an inheritors of history and culture…

> The Germans don't really have any more right to it than she does. Article 56 of the Hague Convention of 1907 disagrees. Stealing art is a war crime. So do the Allies themselves, in their memorandum on January 5th, 1943. > The most likely story of this bust is from the 5th century until the 18th or 19th centuries, it was buried in the ground somewhere in Italy or former Roman empire. Given that the person depicted w…

I guess article 56 of the Hague convention does not apply to the British Museum?

Re: $35 sculpture found at an Austin Goodwill was looted from a museum during WWII

#188

Post by disgu »

O__________O wrote: post #3

Odd, why is this Roman sculpture being returned to Germany? It’s obviously not a German artifact and while I might be wrong, I assume it was “looted” from Italy.

Are you being serious?

The Roman Empire covered Germany and it covered that specific part of Germany (Aschaffenburg) as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Empire

Re: $35 sculpture found at an Austin Goodwill was looted from a museum during WWII

#189

Post by adastra22 »

Wohlf wrote: post #26
jart wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was legally acquired by the woman who just paid $35 at Goodwill. The thing is two thousand years old. Why do people care who owned it during the Weimar Republic?

Possession and sale of stolen goods is not legal, just not a crime unless you are aware it's stolen/likely stolen.

Well by that logic it was stolen by the person who dug it up in Italy. After all, there’s someone walking around Italy today that is the heir to this sculpture. You have to draw the line somewhere.

Re: $35 sculpture found at an Austin Goodwill was looted from a museum during WWII

#190

Post by [deleted] »

Aeolun wrote: post #148
dreamcompiler wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So maybe she emails the museum and says "pick it up." And then a week later a guy shows up on her doorstep and says "I'm here to pick it up." How does she know the guy really works for the museum and is not some criminal who hacked into her email? She's never met him, and he's not going to be carrying an FBI badge after all. If she gives the bust to the wrong guy, maybe the museum sues her because it was their proper…

I’d be damned if I were going to pay for a lawyer because of a $35 goodwill thing. Ancient Roman art or no. I can totally see why people just keep it on the mantelpiece.

[deleted]
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